Perplexity’s Airtel Giveaway Made It Bigger in India. It Did Not Prove Conversion.

Perplexity gave Airtel customers in India a free year of Pro and quickly gained a much larger audience. That expansion persisted in aggregate active-user data after new claims ended, while mobile-revenue estimates rose. Yet the available data cannot establish whether Airtel recipients deliberately became paying subscribers.

The offer created a rapid acquisition burst

In July 2025, Perplexity partnered with Airtel to offer a free 12-month Pro subscription to the carrier’s 360 million Indian customers. The service was normally valued at about $200. New redemptions ended on January 16, but each user kept access for a year from activation.

Sensor Tower estimated 5.9 million Perplexity downloads in India during the launch month, up 625% from June 2025. Across the seven months in which new users could claim the offer, downloads reached an estimated 56 million—more than nine times the preceding seven-month total.

The revenue signal has an attribution problem

Usage and acquisition therefore moved differently: downloads dropped sharply once the eligibility window closed, but Perplexity’s overall India active-user base remained far above its pre-offer level. Those figures do not identify which active users had received Airtel’s free subscription.

Revenue estimates also point upward. Sensor Tower estimated Indian in-app purchase and subscription revenue rose about 60% from February through mid-August compared with the period when new users could claim the offer. Appfigures estimated $878,000 in Indian revenue for the first seven months of 2026, 16% more than all of 2025; its July monthly estimate was $156,000, versus about $34,000 in January 2025.

Why those numbers cannot settle conversion

• The free subscriptions were set to auto-renew unless users cancelled, so a subsequent charge may not reflect an affirmative decision to subscribe.
• Sensor Tower cannot separate former Airtel users who actively subscribed from users who missed cancellation or other paying customers.
• Appfigures cautioned that the promotion’s visibility may have drawn paying users who never used the Airtel giveaway.

Perplexity has demonstrated that the Airtel offer coincided with enormous reach and a larger overall active-user base in India. It has not demonstrated the commercial mechanism behind its higher revenue estimates. More subscription expirations can add data, but not resolve that question unless measurement distinguishes recipients, voluntary renewals and unrelated customers.